The first two seasons are brilliant (9/10). They play like a class analysis of Zagreb in the last decade of socialism. The six Vragec brothers are suburban poor, raising themselves while their gastarbeiter parents are gone. Marina's family represents the urban and educated middle class of Yugoslav respectability. Nosonja and Mira's household with kid Dado stands in between as petty intellectual red-bourgeoisie. This triangle mirrored real anxieties of the Yugoslav 1980s: absent parents working abroad, discipline and respectability as the state's ideal, and the opportunist informer who survives by bending rules. That mix of children's mischief and social critique gave the show its sharpness and warmth.
By seasons three and four, the older kids fade into teenage and student roles, while younger kids, (in)famous Bongo, Lara, Bimbo and grandpa Jozo take the stage. The tone shifts toward slapstick, spoof, and parody. Consumerism, American brands, and late Yugoslav pop aesthetics frame the humor. Some gags are flat, a few age badly (bluntly racist and homophobic), but the cultural satire still reflects its moment.
Season five collapses. It turns into a carousel of cameos. Croatia's president Tudman, Dinamo's coach Ciro Blazevic, pop diva Josipa Lisac, and other various celebrities appear only to congratulate themselves on their importance. Storylines thin out, coherence disappears, and the show becomes a self-applause machine rather than a continuation of the kids' world.
Season six is grotesque. Filmed in 1996 but set in late 1991, it invents a Zagreb under siege with barricades and Sarajevo-style street fighting that never happened in real life. It rewrites history to fit Tudman's hardline wartime narrative. Actors playing iconic characters purged from public life, like Mira Furlan and Djordje Rapajic, are written off as conveniently "abroad fundraising for Croatia." The overall tone is dehumanizing, foul, and beyond the propaganda films of the 1990s. It is a parody without humor, grotesque even by those standards.
Seen as a whole, Smogovci mirrors Hrvoje Hitrec's own ideological trajectory. He began as a convinced Marxist-Leninist intellectual and ended as an unrepentant ultranationalist. The series charts that arc, from grounded class critique, to late socialist pop consumerism, to crude nationalist mythmaking.
Smogovci remains a cultural landmark. The early seasons are witty, humane, and real. The finale is an insult to both viewers and history. The best future for the series would be a seventh season that ignores the sixth entirely as if it never existed.
